Wall Street Journal: “Perfectly Packaged Violence”
Mixed Martial Arts: Perfectly Packaged Violence Boxing and mixed martial arts would be a lot more jarring and a lot…
Mixed Martial Arts: Perfectly Packaged Violence
Boxing and mixed martial arts would be a lot more jarring and a lot less cool if people just started hitting each other, so both sports depend on promoters and title-dispensing organizations to add some order to what would otherwise be plain old violence. But MMA’s Ultimate Fighting Championship has a uniquely top-down, quasi-feudal format that has drawn criticism from some corners.
It’s hard to miss the whiff of exploitation in the way that UFC’s league-owned fighters are paid. But the UFC’s broader success is hard to deny: Last month’s UFC 100 outperformed the landmark Floyd Mayweather-Oscar De La Hoya fight by 75% in terms of pay-per-view orders, and Saturday’s UFC 101 is expected to sell out Philadelphia’s Wachovia Center and pull in a $3.4 million gate.
Those disinclined to give the benefit of the doubt to UFC commissioner/owner/czar Dana White — who styles himself as a swaggering, ultra-profane billboard for his various brands — see him as a not-so-benevolent dictator. But Yahoo’s Dan Wetzel argues that White’s engineering of Saturday’s show-stealing, non-title undercard between Anderson Silva and Forrest Griffin is an example of the most hands-on show-runner in sports at his very best. This is like when the old movie studios owned the actors and paired them up with scripts and co-stars as management saw fit, Wetzel writes. It may or may not be good for the fighters’ immediate finances (they earn a fraction of top boxers). It is, however, an undoubted boon to fans. There is no Floyd Mayweather-Juan Manuel Marquez to sit through when all anyone wants to see is Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao.
In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Don Steinberg marvels at the efficiency of the UFC machine. It’s still bloody and violent, but controlled and packaged — in a way boxing promoters can only envy, Steinberg writes. The UFC fills roles that, in boxing, multiple entities perform. It signs fighters to contracts, decides who fights whom in its trademark octagonal cage, promotes events, and awards its own championship belts… UFC events are high-energy spectacles with a pro wrestling vibe but authentic, well-matched fights.
The UFC’s trademarked parity means that the top four fighters on Saturday’s card — Silva (24-4), Griffin (16-5) and heavyweight lightweight headliners B.J. Penn (13-5-1) and Kenny Florian (11-3) — all have records that would make them quasi-journeymen in boxing. In the Philadelphia Daily News, Bernard Fernandez argues that all those losses have a lot to do with the UFC’s appeal. The deep thinkers behind the explosion in popularity of mixed martial arts cite the rise and inevitable fall of boxing’s unblemished fakes as one of the reasons their enterprise has avoided some of the problems that continue to plague the older, more traditional combat sport, Fernandez writes. It’s all right to lose, the theory goes, so long as a defeat comes against a competitive opponent, in an entertaining match. … Put it this way: Buster Douglas might have pulled off boxing’s biggest upset when, as a 42-1 underdog, he shocked the seemingly invincible Mike Tyson — but in the UFC, there are no 42-1 underdogs. Or even 10-1 underdogs.
For a long, literary look behind UFC’s scenes — and a complicated portrait of MMA fighter Quinton Rampage Jackson — check out David Samuels’s terrific feature from the December 2008 Atlantic.